Morphology is the study of the smallest meaningful elements in language. The goal of this course is to introduce the basic morphological concepts that are used to describe and explain the internal structure of words in a cross-linguistic fashion. What is special about Arabic or Hindi plural formation, how are concepts of vowel harmony applied to languages such as Finnish or Hungarian, does Mandarin Chinese inflect its words at all?

This course will take a critical look at the theoretical notions that have been developed to account for these and other phenomena encountered in word structure. We will apply these notions to the analysis of as many languages as possible inlcuding the methods of linguistic fieldwork using the fieldwork classes of the Virtual Linguistics Campus.

This modules in this repository introduce various topics related to the study of meaning:

• Word Semantics - How words relate to the world and to other words of a language
• Sentence Semantics - How the meanings of sentences can be specified
• Pragmatics - How people use language and with what effects
• Meaning Acquisition - How children learn the meanings of words
• Computational Semantics - How machines handle meaning
• Cognitive Semantics - How meaning relates to the cognitive abilities of humans
• Historical Semantics - How meanings change over time

This course introduces students to the basic concepts underlying the production, perception, and physics of speech. It is subdivided into three parts:

1. A general survey of articulatory phonetics
2. A short introduction to auditory phonetics
3. A discussion of the most important physical aspects of speech and the most widely used experimental techniques.

Since many universities confine their curriculum to articulatory phonetics, this part is given maximum attention in the course.

This repository/course covers the history of the English language from its remote Indo-European origins (and even before) to the present day.

It provides substantial information about the English language at different periods and introduces the main theoretical and technical concepts of historical linguistics, taking into account recent work in historical and general linguistics. To satisfy the needs of the current secondary school curriculum in many countries, its main focus, however, is Early Modern English.

Special emphasis will be put on practical aspects, such as, reading and the analysis of texts taken from different periods of English.